Last week, the never ending drumbeat of biz travel took me to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The show was, to put it mildy, a zoo - even by Vegas standards. If you aren’t a fan of the teeming throngs of humanity (over 150K in this case), then CES probably isn’t your schtick. First, take the surrealness that’s Vegas any other time of the year. Then, crank it up by putting a substantial portion of the export sales of East Asia on the line. Sprinkle in “kick off the year” business frenzy and you end up with the pomp and circumstance that’s CES.

While the show itself borders on obscene with the high end electronics, walls o’ plasmas, booth babes, audio equipment, cars, cellphones, computers and so on…. the real craziness happens after convention hours. There, Fortune 100 companies revert to playground one-upsmanship but on a multi-million dollar scale with dinner banquets, parties, concerts and the sorts of gala’s you can only have in Las Vegas. Like many things related to biz travel, it sounds like it might be sorta fun — and it is, at first — but the whole thing becomes a little numbing after a while.

As I’ve mentioned in previous blogposts, my company is heavily involved in the nascent “mobile broadcast” space — put simply, it’s where television and mobile phones intersect. And the CES-highlight for our space was Verizon’s announcment that their MobileTV service will launch in late 1Q / 2007.

To celebrate this & a few other announcements, Verizon rented out the world famous Nobu restaurant at the Hard Rock. Their party was first class all the way with Nobu’s reknowned sushi chefs taking guests’ orders in realtime and hand filling them on the spot — ensuring no more than a few precious seconds from when the roll is expertly patted closed to landing in your convention starved mouth.

So, in the midst of all this mass market, Vegas-kitsch tinged, first-class-ness, imagine how cool it was to discover they had hired DJ Rekha to lay down the beat in the main tent…

… but I didn’t know this going in. I attended the party with some other industry colleagues and, while sipping cocktails and exchanging banter, I noticed that the heretofore unseen DJ had shifted the background tunes from Akon to Bhangra. And then another, more film-y song. I pointed out to a (non-desi) colleague that this collection of proverbial old, rich white dudes were being bathed in Indian music — and the beats blended so well that most ‘em scarcely realized it. He told me that he’d gone by the DJ booth and noticed that the DJ was in fact, desi. And when I made my way to the booth and saw her name tag… it was the one and only DJ Rekha who has been covered on SM before (see here, here, and here, for ex) for her Basement Bhangra parties in in NYC.

I introduced myself and we chatted for a bit. I requested a song from Dhoom 2 - she didn’t have it but did end up playing Say Na Say Na from Bluffmaster and Dus Bahaane.. Despite Indo-Pop not being quite her bag, she had the sort of stuff I was looking for. She confirmed that Verizon (or more specifically the event planner Verizon hired) really did pay to fly her out from NYC to Las Vegas for their corporate gig and they had encouraged her to toss in some desi tunes into an otherwise generic corporate play list.

For DJ Rekha, it was also an opportunity to drum up advance interest in a new CD she’ll release later this year. (I scanned in the advance flyer below). For me, it was a welcome touch of flavor in an otherwise sensory-numbing week and a very cool measure of Desi cultural progress within an otherwise very conservative situation.